[It has] a wide screen 7.2" display and absolutely stunning looks and style.
1. 7.2 inches is wide? In what universe?? The article blurb ends with gushing praise.
2. Geeks worldwide can instantly recognize this as marketing speak, and it makes them shiver. Our fearless leaders Rob Malda and friends put themselves forward as being geeks, and used to have the ability to instantly recognize such junk and keep it off the front page.
3. It's entirely feasible that Rob Malda and friends want to make more money. Especially if they think they can do it at our expense without us recognizing the funny business.
After wasting too much time and money drilling holes in PCBs, I must say, SMT looks like the way to go, seems like you'd save money in the long run if you just got a decent soldering iron / hot air gun up front, compared to money on the continually broken drill bits.
Yes, even normal users sometimes need more precise clocks. The most obvious case is GPS mentioned earlier in these posts. Quote:
Currently, the GPS system provides time to the general public with uncertainties measured in nanoseconds.
GPS receivers are required to synchronize very closely to the atomic clocks in the GPS sattelites in order to calculate position... they have to measure how far RF signals (travelling at the speed of light) have gone. GPS receivers (and the article's atomic clock) are more than a million times more precise than "a few ms of lag".
There are actually a lot of sites out there that will let you access arbitrary content from elsewhere. Most corporate restricting proxies will block at least some of them (but it's impossible to get all of them). So something that could be as high-profile as Coral is less useful compared to some of the more obtuse of these:
google cache (this has been periodically blocked at my company)
online translation sites (eg. if it's an english site, have the translator go from japanese to english... none of the words will be recognized as japanese, so it will pass them all as-is)
Erm? If you mean the "5mb webspace" places, no, they don't charge for bandwidth. They just cancel your account if you post porn or anything else that will get heavily downloaded.
As far as I know, anybody in the 0.5gig/month or over (all the way up to the backbone carrierers, which have to have peering agreements as an exception to the rule of charging for bandwidth) charges per megabyte.
I think the point is that absolute URLs are usually not necessary... So if a website wants to serve out tons of FREE BANDWIDTH, it's only a pittance to fix their URLs.
And here is an article on ibm.com about how to do the trick where the kernel is booted from a floppy/CD, finds the USB mass storage device, mounts it, and uses it as the root filesystems. And another article here. Looks pretty straightforward.
And guess why you don't see anybody using compressed file systems on their hard drives any more? Because they're too slow, nobody uses them unless they're really forced to. So you've added a fourth bullet point:
Faster access than a knoppix CD-ROM
While I'm here posting, just thought I'd link to NewEgg's huge selection of 2.5 " enclosures, the model numbers really makes it easy to research them.
If the CD only needs to boot, load USB drivers, and hand off control to the USB drive, it can be shrunk to a business-card CD. I'm guessing that a business-card CD + 2.5" hard drive isn't any less convenient than one full-size CD.
With 40GB available, you can have 58 times as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
Hard drives can be written to as well as read from, so you can use it to carry documents and MP3s along with you, and don't have to stream these over the network like you'd have to with Knoppix.
In short, it's waaaaay more functional than a bootable CD.
'Course, so is caller-ID, but that doesn't stop phone companies from charging you $3.50 a month for something that costs them nothing.
As long as phone companies keep acting like they're... well.... The Phone Company, it won't be hard to find cheaper solutions, even if more copper needs to be installed first.
And how long will it take until one of the smarter virus writers writes a patch for tcpip.sys, after which the hoard of stupid virus writers just include that in their programs?
The throttling functionality really needs to reside on the router side, on routers that don't run Windows. Then every joe-shmoe virus/worm won't be able to bypass it easily.
The script provides for custom firewall rules, so it's meant to be able to selectively block... random guess here... Slashdot, but leave google still accessible.
Yeah, that's where I'm heading too. Even the $80 Linksys WRT54GS has a faster processor, right? I don't know how economical these Single-Board-Computers are, but you can get pretty fast CPUs for a reasonable amount of money, and low-power enough to still not require a fan. Are these sort of things in the realm of hobbyists, or does it become to expensive/difficult to engineer single quantities of these?
And maybe a bit of commentary on this board in particular...
The exact specs are:
4K of code space
128K RAM
100MHz processor
These chips DEFINITELY have their place (eg. are compact enough to build the retro Atari-games-completely-inside-controller things), but aren't to be confused with a $200 X-Box, which you can learn game development on, but which would be much more powerful.
There are plenty of SX52 development boards available to play with, many cheaper than this. Personally, for hardware hobbyists, the main draw of these boards is something to quickly let me play with the broad range of functionality of the devices, so I can figure out how to build a smaller/cheaper board for specific tasks later. Others may be able to better comment on how good of a deal this is...
When you've got 4K of code space, like this chip has, you have to get creative. Plenty of people are still hacking with these tiny devices, often in assembly.
Most reputable businesses choose advertising channels where the advertiser bears the majority of the cost of the advertisement. These advertisements tend to have at least SOME downward pressure on the total number of advertisements a person will be forced to see. These advertisers are on the whole a little more truthful, because the money trail back to them is larger and clearer.
Less reputable businesses may choose advertising channels where the advertiser bears a very low percentage of the cost of their advertisement. Because they pay very little, and the overhead costs are small, it's easier to employ random and changing small-time "advertisers" and it's easier to generally obscure the money trail, allowing for less truthful advertisements. Because the cost of each ad impression is very very low, there's virtually no downward pressure on the number of ads a person may be forced to see. Because these "advertisers" are in the game for a quick buck, and their reputations won't suffer from any ill will, they don't care if they decrease the value of the targetted communications channel to nearly zero, to the point where people start considering abandoning it.
And the judges practically put a sign in their front yard that said "all brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions should go to Orrin instead":
Indeed, the Supreme Court has admonished us to leave such matters to Congress. In Sony-Betamax, the Court spoke quite clearly about the role of Congress in applying copyright law to new technologies. As the Supreme Court stated in that case, "The direction of Art. I is that Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. When, as here, the Constitution is permissive, the sign of how far Congress has chosen to go can come only from Congress." 464 U.S. at 456 (quoting Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp., 406 U.S. 518, 530 (1972)).
There are several important differences between a little system like this and an old computer:
low power... makes the box silent, and the power-supply is simpler/cooler and likely to have a longer life
simpler software... unlike an old box that potentially has a ton of different things running on it, this has a smaller set of very stable software that's likely to continue working forever
easy backup/restore... the ROM image is 16MB, so it's something you can put a copy on all of your computers, and is trivial to restore. Whereas if your random machine lost its installation, how long would it take to do a re-install?
it's small and cheap... yes, spare computers are cheaper, but whereas it's feasible to maintain and store 25 NSLU2's in my computer room, the same is not true of spare boxes... it'd be too noisy and much less stable.
Where we're going with this is having separate hardware to do each little network task. Since they're all running on separate CPU's, if one of them does die, the other ones will be fine, and will likely continue running for a long time.
audio output/video playback (one per room)
firewall/NAT/WiFi
DMZ services
apache
sendmail
network attached storage
backup/restore
X10 network interface
...
These are things you simply want to always work, and don't want to screw around too much.
The issue that this is trying to solve is to reduce latency (*). It's about 2450 miles from New York to Los Angeles. If you're sitting in New York, and traceroute a computer in Los Angeles, then the difference in time between your ISP's router (which could potentially afford to upgrade to all-optical) and Los Angeles's router should be approximately 13 milliseconds. Right now, it's MUCH higher than this.
Imagine if you could play first-person-shooters with anyone in the world, and it would seem like they were playing next door, no matter how far away they lived. Sure, there's certainly still a great deal of delay between when your brain says "click the mouse button", the mouse button actually gets clicked, the signal travels through the USB port, into the CPU, processed by the game, and sent out as a internet packet, but 13 MILLISECONDS PING, can you imagine that?
(*) Right now, max bandwidth isn't a technical problem, it's an economics
problem... if everybody could afford to buy gigabit ethernet at home, then the internet would definitely be more useful to people.
Whatever solution you choose, just note: YOU CAN DO THIS WITHOUT DECODING AND RE-ENCODING.
If you set things up properly (namely limiting the use of the interframe bit reservoir), then there are many utilities which will allow you to pull out specific frames from within an MP3 file. This should both be much faster from a processing standpoint, and not incur more data loss from two encodings.
What's NOT solid is the whole concept of selling products which contain the encrypt and decrypt keys to customers, and thinking that they're never going to be able to recover those keys from the product you just put in their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, the WRT54G already does AES-128 in its stock form.
Visa and MasterCard use different prefixes though... so you have to change the number range to 5000000000000000..5699999999999999.
1. 7.2 inches is wide? In what universe?? The article blurb ends with gushing praise.
2. Geeks worldwide can instantly recognize this as marketing speak, and it makes them shiver. Our fearless leaders Rob Malda and friends put themselves forward as being geeks, and used to have the ability to instantly recognize such junk and keep it off the front page.
3. It's entirely feasible that Rob Malda and friends want to make more money. Especially if they think they can do it at our expense without us recognizing the funny business.
Why didn't they go after Sveasoft then for charging $20 for the binaries and $49 for the source?
After wasting too much time and money drilling holes in PCBs, I must say, SMT looks like the way to go, seems like you'd save money in the long run if you just got a decent soldering iron / hot air gun up front, compared to money on the continually broken drill bits.
GPS receivers are required to synchronize very closely to the atomic clocks in the GPS sattelites in order to calculate position... they have to measure how far RF signals (travelling at the speed of light) have gone. GPS receivers (and the article's atomic clock) are more than a million times more precise than "a few ms of lag".
http://www.nyud.net.nyud.net.8090.nyud.net:8090/
Or the mirror-of-the-mirror-of-the-mirror:
http://www.nyud.net.nyud.net.8090.nyud.net.8090.ny ud.net:8090/
They should have posted THAT link to slashdot to see how well the system faired.
As far as I know, anybody in the 0.5gig/month or over (all the way up to the backbone carrierers, which have to have peering agreements as an exception to the rule of charging for bandwidth) charges per megabyte.
I think the point is that absolute URLs are usually not necessary... So if a website wants to serve out tons of FREE BANDWIDTH, it's only a pittance to fix their URLs.
And here is an article on ibm.com about how to do the trick where the kernel is booted from a floppy/CD, finds the USB mass storage device, mounts it, and uses it as the root filesystems. And another article here. Looks pretty straightforward.
While I'm here posting, just thought I'd link to NewEgg's huge selection of 2.5 " enclosures, the model numbers really makes it easy to research them.
- If the CD only needs to boot, load USB drivers, and hand off control to the USB drive, it can be shrunk to a business-card CD. I'm guessing that a business-card CD + 2.5" hard drive isn't any less convenient than one full-size CD.
- With 40GB available, you can have 58 times as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
- Hard drives can be written to as well as read from, so you can use it to carry documents and MP3s along with you, and don't have to stream these over the network like you'd have to with Knoppix.
In short, it's waaaaay more functional than a bootable CD.As long as phone companies keep acting like they're... well.... The Phone Company, it won't be hard to find cheaper solutions, even if more copper needs to be installed first.
The throttling functionality really needs to reside on the router side, on routers that don't run Windows. Then every joe-shmoe virus/worm won't be able to bypass it easily.
The script provides for custom firewall rules, so it's meant to be able to selectively block... random guess here... Slashdot, but leave google still accessible.
Yeah, that's where I'm heading too. Even the $80 Linksys WRT54GS has a faster processor, right? I don't know how economical these Single-Board-Computers are, but you can get pretty fast CPUs for a reasonable amount of money, and low-power enough to still not require a fan. Are these sort of things in the realm of hobbyists, or does it become to expensive/difficult to engineer single quantities of these?
The exact specs are:
These chips DEFINITELY have their place (eg. are compact enough to build the retro Atari-games-completely-inside-controller things), but aren't to be confused with a $200 X-Box, which you can learn game development on, but which would be much more powerful.
There are plenty of SX52 development boards available to play with, many cheaper than this. Personally, for hardware hobbyists, the main draw of these boards is something to quickly let me play with the broad range of functionality of the devices, so I can figure out how to build a smaller/cheaper board for specific tasks later. Others may be able to better comment on how good of a deal this is...
When you've got 4K of code space, like this chip has, you have to get creative. Plenty of people are still hacking with these tiny devices, often in assembly.
Most reputable businesses choose advertising channels where the advertiser bears the majority of the cost of the advertisement. These advertisements tend to have at least SOME downward pressure on the total number of advertisements a person will be forced to see. These advertisers are on the whole a little more truthful, because the money trail back to them is larger and clearer.
Less reputable businesses may choose advertising channels where the advertiser bears a very low percentage of the cost of their advertisement. Because they pay very little, and the overhead costs are small, it's easier to employ random and changing small-time "advertisers" and it's easier to generally obscure the money trail, allowing for less truthful advertisements. Because the cost of each ad impression is very very low, there's virtually no downward pressure on the number of ads a person may be forced to see. Because these "advertisers" are in the game for a quick buck, and their reputations won't suffer from any ill will, they don't care if they decrease the value of the targetted communications channel to nearly zero, to the point where people start considering abandoning it.
- low power... makes the box silent, and the power-supply is simpler/cooler and likely to have a longer life
- simpler software... unlike an old box that potentially has a ton of different things running on it, this has a smaller set of very stable software that's likely to continue working forever
- easy backup/restore... the ROM image is 16MB, so it's something you can put a copy on all of your computers, and is trivial to restore. Whereas if your random machine lost its installation, how long would it take to do a re-install?
- it's small and cheap... yes, spare computers are cheaper, but whereas it's feasible to maintain and store 25 NSLU2's in my computer room, the same is not true of spare boxes... it'd be too noisy and much less stable.
Where we're going with this is having separate hardware to do each little network task. Since they're all running on separate CPU's, if one of them does die, the other ones will be fine, and will likely continue running for a long time.- audio output/video playback (one per room)
- firewall/NAT/WiFi
- DMZ services
- apache
- sendmail
- network attached storage
- backup/restore
- X10 network interface
- ...
These are things you simply want to always work, and don't want to screw around too much.Imagine if you could play first-person-shooters with anyone in the world, and it would seem like they were playing next door, no matter how far away they lived. Sure, there's certainly still a great deal of delay between when your brain says "click the mouse button", the mouse button actually gets clicked, the signal travels through the USB port, into the CPU, processed by the game, and sent out as a internet packet, but 13 MILLISECONDS PING, can you imagine that?
If you set things up properly (namely limiting the use of the interframe bit reservoir), then there are many utilities which will allow you to pull out specific frames from within an MP3 file. This should both be much faster from a processing standpoint, and not incur more data loss from two encodings.
What's NOT solid is the whole concept of selling products which contain the encrypt and decrypt keys to customers, and thinking that they're never going to be able to recover those keys from the product you just put in their hands.